Абрахам Меррит - Seven Footprints To Satan

That was an oddly turned phrase, it flashed upon me. And there was an enigmatic something deep in the brown eyes. What did she mean? Was she trying to convey to me some message that Consardine would not suspect? I heard a chuckle and turned to face- Satan.

I could not know how long he had been listening. As his gaze rested on the girl I saw a momentary flashing of the brilliant eyes, and a flicker passed over his face. It was as though the hidden devil within him had licked its lips.

"Quarreling! Oh fie!" he said unctuously.

"Quarreling? Not at all," Eve answered coolly. "It happens that I dislike Mr. Kirkham. I am sorry- but it is so. It seemed to me better to tell him, that we may avoid each other in the future except, of course, when you find it necessary for us to be together, Satan."

It was disconcerting, to say the least. I made no effort to hide my chagrin. Satan looked at me and chuckled again. I had a curious conviction that he was pleased.

"Well," he purred, "even I have no power over personal prejudices. All that I can do is to make use of them. In the meantime- I am hungry."

He seated himself at the table's head; Eve at his right hand, I at his left and Consardine beside me. The Manchu butler and another Chinese served us.

We were in a tower room, clearly. The windows were set high above the floor and through them I could see only the blue sky. The walls were covered with Fragonard and Boucher panels, and I had no doubt that they had been acquired by the "eloquence" of Satan's messengers. The rest of the chamber was in keeping; furnished with that same amazing eclecticism and perception of the beautiful that I had noted in the great hall and in the room where I had first met the blue-eyed devil.

Eve, having defined my place- or lack of place- in her regard, was coolly aloof to me but courteous, and sparkling and witty with Satan and Consardine. The drama of the temple and Cartright's punishment seemed to be forgotten by the three of them. Satan was in the best of humors, but in his diabolic benignity- it is the only way I can describe it – was, to me, the sinister suggestion of a wild beast playful because its appetite has been appeased, an addict of cruelty mellowed by the ultimate anguish to which he has subjected a sacrifice. I had a vivid and unpleasant picture of him wallowing like a tiger upon the torn carcass of the man whom he had sent out of life a few hours before through the gateways of hell.

Yet the sunlight stripped him of much of his vague terror. And if he was, as Barker had put it, "an 'og for entertainment" he was himself a masterly entertainer. Something had shifted the conversation toward Genghis Khan and for half an hour Satan told us stories of that Ruler of the Golden Horde and his black palace in his lost city of Khara-Khoto in the Gobi that wiped all the present out of my mind and set me back, seeing and hearing, into a world ten centuries gone; stories tragic and comic. Rabelaisian and tender- and all as though he had himself been a witness to what he described. Indeed, listening, it seemed to me that he could have been nothing else. Devil or not, the man had magic.

And at the end he signaled the two servants to go, and when they had gone he said to me, abruptly: "Well, James Kirkham, is it yes or no?" I feigned to hesitate. I leaned my head upon my hand and under its cover shot a glance at Eve. She was patting her mouth with slim fingers, suppressing a yawn- but there was a pallor upon her face that had not been there a moment before. I felt Satan's will beating down upon me, tangibly.

"Yes- or no?" he repeated.

"Yes," I said, "if, Satan, you will answer one question."

"It is always permitted to ask," he replied. "Well, then," I said, "I want to know what kind of an- employer you are before I make a play that may mean life service to me. A man is his aims plus the way he works to attain them. As to your methods, I have had at least an illuminative inkling. But what are your aims? In the olden days, Satan, the question would have been unnecessary. Everybody who dealt with you knew that what you were after were souls to keep your furnaces busy. But Hell, I understand, has been modernized with its Master. Furnaces are out of date and fuel therefore nothing like so valuable. Yet still, as of old, you take your prospective customers up a high mountain and offer them the kingdoms of Earth. Very well, the question. What, Satan, do you get out of it now?"

"There you have one reason for my aversion to Mr. Kirkham," murmured Eve. "He admits nothing that cannot be balanced in a set of books. He has the shopkeeper outlook."

I ignored this thrust. But once more Satan chuckled from still lips.

"A proper question, Eve," he told her. "You forget that even I always keep my accounts balanced- and present them when the time comes for payment."

He spoke the last words slowly, contemplatively, staring at her- and again I saw the devil's gloating flicker over his face. And she saw it too, for she caught her lip between her teeth to check its trembling.

"Then answer," I spoke abruptly to draw his attention from her back to me. He studied me as though picking the words to reply.

"Call it," he said at last, "amusement. It is for amusement that I exist. It is for that alone that I remain upon a world in which, when all is said and done, amusement in some form or guise is the one great aim of all, the only thing that makes life upon it tolerable. My aim is, therefore, you perceive, a simple one. But what is it that amuses me?

"Three things. I am a great playwright, the greatest that has ever lived, since my plays are real. I set the scenes for my little single acts, my farces and comedies, dramas and tragedies, my epics. I direct the actors. I am the sole audience that can see every action, hear every line, of my plays from beginning to end. Sometimes what began as a farce turns into high tragedy, tragedies become farces, a one-act diversion develops into an epic, governments fall, the mighty topple from their pedestals, the lowly are exalted. Some people live their lives for chess. I play my chess with living chessmen and I play a score of games at once in all corners of the world. All this amuses me. Furthermore, in my character as Prince of Darkness, which I perceive, James Kirkham, that you do not wholly admit, my art puts me on a par with that other super-dramatist, my ancient and Celestial adversary known according to the dominant local creed as Jehovah. Nay, it places me higher – since I rewrite his script. This also amuses me."

Under the suave, sardonic mockery I read truth. To this cold, monstrous intellect, men and women were only puppets moving over a worldwide stage. Suffering, sorrow, anguish of mind or body were to it nothing but entertaining reactions to situations which it had conceived. Like the dark Power whose name Satan had taken, souls were his playthings. Their antics amused him. In that he found sufficient reward for labor.

"That," he said, "is one of the three. The second? I am a lover of beauty. It is, indeed, the one thing that can arouse in me what may be called- emotion. It happens now and then that man with his mind and eyes and heart and hands makes visible and manifest something which bears that stamp of creative perfection, the monopoly of which tradition ascribes to the same Celestial adversary I have named. It may be a painting, a statue, a carved bit of wood, a crystal, a vase, a fabric- any one of ten thousand things. But in it is that essence of beauty humanity calls divine and for which, in its blundering way, it is always seeking- as it is amusement. The best of these things I make from time to time my own. But – I will not have them come to me except by my own way. Here enters the third element- the gamble, the game.

"For example. I decided, after mature reflection, that the Mona Lisa of da Vinci, in the Louvre, had the quality I desired. It could not, of course, be bought; nor did I desire to buy it. Yet it is here. In this house. I allowed France to recover an excellent duplicate in which my experts reproduced perfectly even the microscopic cracks in the paint. Only now have they begun to suspect. They can never be sure- and that amuses me more than if they knew.